Title: How we helped 500 founders find PMF 3x faster (without hiring SDRs)

Read time: 4 min

Today, I want to talk about something I see all the time, and honestly, it’s heartbreaking

I get on calls weekly with founders who've raised $1-3M. Smart people. Great products. Solid teams. Working their asses off.

And they're stuck in the same place for 6-12 months, completely underleveraged.

They'll spend three weeks perfecting their pitch deck. Obsess over their tech stack. Rewrite their positioning for the fifth time. And I get it, all of that feels productive. It feels like you're moving forward.

Meanwhile, their discovery call has no structure. They freeze when prospects throw objections. Their demo is just a feature tour. And they're not doing any consistent outbound.

Then they tell me they can't afford coaching. "Timing isn't right." "Budget's tight."

And look, I completely understand that. No one wants to spend money when runway is everything. That instinct to conserve cash makes sense.

But here's what I always come back to: you raised $2M to validate whether you have a business. The fastest way to do that is through sales. If investing 1-2% of your raise into learning how to close deals cuts your path to PMF by even a few months, or increases your odds of success by 30%, what's the ROI on that?

I'm not saying this to pitch you. I'm saying it because I've watched too many smart founders burn through runway optimizing things that don't matter while the fundamentals go ignored.

That's not being careful with capital. That's being underleveraged.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

~Archimedes

This is one of my favorite quotes.

What did Archimedes really mean here? He wasn't talking about physical levers. He was talking about force multiplication.

The right lever, in the right place, lets you move something 10x or 100x your own strength.

That's leverage.

During my early days in business, I was trying to move the world with my bare hands and grinding out 16-hour days on activities that didn't compound. I was underleveraged. I also thought I had to know everything about business. The truth is, I didn't, but I needed people on my team who did. You don't need to build the house, but you do need to understand the principles of how it works.

These are the same principles that allowed Elon to send rockets into space.

I realized that if I focused on 20% of activities that created 80% of results, I would increase my chance of being successful significantly. I figure out leverage. Business is a leverage game.

Roger Gracie is widely considered the greatest Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitor of all time.

He won 10 World Championships. Dominated everyone for over a decade, and his game was stupidly simple.

Five attacks. Five defenses. That's it.

Everyone knew what he was going to do. But it didn't matter. He'd drilled those moves so many thousands of times in repetition that his execution was flawless.

While his opponents were learning 101 different techniques, Roger mastered 10.

And that's why he was untouchable.

Depth beats breadth every single time.

When we’re early founders, we’re trying to learn 50 things at once. We’re consuming content, testing tactics, jumping from framework to framework.

Winning is identifying the 20% that matters and drilling it until it's bulletproof.

If you apply the 80/20 rule to early-stage sales, here's what you find:

80% of your results come from 20% of your activities.

And that 20% is embarrassingly simple:

1. Master Your Outbound Messaging - Gets you at-bats

2. Master Your Discovery Call - Validates market want

3. Master Your Demo - Shows how you solve their problems

4. Master Objection Handling - Proves you're a pro

5. Create an Irresistible Offer - Shows you're all in

That’s it. Five things

If you have these five things dialed in, you can scale to $1M ARR. I've seen it hundreds of times.

The alternative is you burn runway and wonder why deals keep ghosting.

How We Stay Underleveraged

Here's what I see on almost every introductory call I have:

Founders not realizing they’re optimizing for the wrong things. They'll spend a week rewriting cold emails while their disco call has zero structure.

Obsessing over pricing tiers while they can't answer basic objections without stumbling.

Building a beautiful demo deck while they have no one to demo it to because they're not doing outbound.

And it's certainly not laziness. They're working their asses off.

But think about this, if coaching or investing to fill in these gaps can help:

• Close deals 30% faster

• Avoid burning $200K in trying to figure it out

• Increase your odds of long-term success by 30%

• Find PMF perhaps 6 months earlier

What's the ROI on that?

But oftentimes they’re thinking like someone who's underleveraged, protecting pennies while burning dollars.

You can't save your way to success. You have to invest in the levers that compound.

Coaching is one lever. Hiring is another. Systems are a third.

But if you raised capital and you're not deploying it into things that multiply your output, you're playing defense.

And defense doesn't win in startups.

The Five Things That Actually Matter

If you want to be leveraged, here's where to focus 80% of your sales time:

1. Master Your Outbound Messaging

If you don't have people to talk to, nothing else matters. Your outbound messaging is what gets you consistent at-bats.

You need leads coming in every single day. That means:

• 5-10 personalized cold emails daily

• 30-50 LinkedIn connection requests daily

• 75-100 Cold calls if your ICP picks up the phone

Drill: Block 90 minutes every morning for outbound. Before Slack. Before email. Track what messaging gets replies. Do more of that.

2. Master Your Discovery Call

Discovery is the process of determining whether you've created something the market wants. If you can't qualify correctly, nothing else matters.

You need to identify:

• Budget (Can they afford you?)

• Authority (Who makes the decision?)

• Need (Do they have a broken leg or a bum knee?)

• Timing (When are they looking to move?)

If you're not nailing BANT on every call, you're burning opportunities.

Drill: Record your next three discovery calls. Listen back. Where did you talk too much? Where did you let them off the hook? Fix those two things.

3. Master Your Demo

Your demo should not be a product tour. It should be a tailored solution to the specific problems they shared in discovery.

Most founders demo features. Winners demo outcomes.

"Here's our dashboard" vs. "Remember you said reporting takes 6 hours? Here's how we cut that to 20 minutes."

Drill: Build a demo deck that's only six slides, every slide maps to a pain point from discovery. No fluff.

4. Master Objection Handling

Every prospect will throw objections at you. Most founders fold immediately.

"We're handling this internally." → You move on.
"Can you send me some info?" → You send a deck and they ghost.
"We need to think about it." → You say "no problem" and lose the deal.

Founders who are crushing have rebuttals for every objection. They've practiced them out loud. They deliver them with conviction. That's what separates pros from amateurs.

Drill: Write down the top 5 objections you hear. Script a rebuttal for each. Role-play them daily for two weeks.

5. Create an Irresistible Offer

Your offer is what shows you're willing to put it all on the line. I find that a lot of founders are scared to guarantee anything.

Winners create offers that remove all the risk from the buyer:

"For $2,500, we'll deliver (two specific outcomes) in 30 days. If we don't hit both, full refund plus 30 days free. If we do, you move to an annual contract and give us a testimonial."

That's an offer that's impossible to refuse. It shows confidence. It shows conviction. And it closes deals.

Drill: Build your paid POC offer this week. Two guarantees. Clear timeline. Real stakes. Then start pitching it.

Takeaway

I promise you, as someone who has been doing this at the highest level for a long time: You don't need 50 tactics. You need five things done at an elite level.

Roger Gracie won 10 World Championships with 10 moves.

Elon sent rockets into space with no background in aerospace. He understood first principles, the compounds that make up a rocket, and the physics. He focused on the few levers that produced 80% of SpaceX's success. That's leverage.

You can build a $10M company with five sales fundamentals. I've seen Rho and Ramp do this. But you have to stop chasing shiny objects and start drilling the basics until they're flawless.

If there's one thing I want you to walk away with, it's this: Become a master of the craft of selling.

It's one of the longest and most powerful levers you can possess. Stop dabbling and start leveraging.

If you're ready to stop being underleveraged and want help mastering these five fundamentals, let's talk.

I've spent the last eight years helping 500+ founding teams do exactly this. We don't chase tactics. We drill the fundamentals until they're bulletproof. We build systems that compound. And we get you leveraged fast.

Book a call with me. I'll listen to where you're stuck, tell you what I see, and we'll figure out if working together makes sense.

I’ll give it to you straight from someone who's been in the arena and knows how to get you unstuck.

Book a call here.

See you all next week!

Darren